business2blog: Google Smashes the Walled Garden

Bill Burnham has an excellent post about the implications of Google Base on walled-garden listing-type sites such as eBay, Match.com, Monster.com, and Realtor.com. His thesis is that the rise of self publishing on the Web (for both businesses and individuals), pervasive search, and RSS feeds will soon combine together to make such paid listing sites less relevant. That is where Google Base comes in, which he points out is an XML database, meaning that it can automatocally exchange data with other Websites. Burnham thinks that Google Base is going to suck up all the listings data out there on the Web and automatically generate new listings directories such as Google Cars, Google Jobs, and Google Houses.